New Urban Movement As an Emerging Field in Poland

Since 2008 we observe the intensification of grassroot neighbourhood activism in Polish cities along with popularization of the Lefebvre’s idea of the “right to the city” among urban activists (Lefebvre 1968, Harvey 2012). With a number of international actors on global level promoting the idea of “placemaking”, Poland becomes a country where a dynamic neighbourhood movement emerges, inspired by specific local problems fused with external influence (coming mostly from so-called “norm entrepreneurs”, Finnemore & Sikkink 1998).

The main focus of this paper is to understand the dynamics of this emerging phenomenon and its wider international as well as national context. We argue that the visibility of ideas and actors of this new movement is a result of growing severity of urban problems as well as raising awareness of cities’ inhabitants, willing to participate in the city governance and striving to become an important actor at the “urban scene”. Although very diverse in nature, we claim that this process and the involved actors can be described and explained using framework of field theory (Fligstein & McAdam 2012).

We use qualitative data from in-depth interviews with both local and international key urban activists as well as with experts in the field to examine the processes that shape the new urban movement and its development in Poland. We postulate that urban renewal can be viewed as a distinct field, as defined by Fligstein & McAdam (2012), in-between the tension of a number of earlier and more established fields and that in the particular case of Poland we can also observe the process of „field-maturing”, with already well established main actors and common definitions. On the other hand, the dominating discourse is still developing, which creates tensions between different parts and actors of this rather heterogeneous movement and raises questions about its future.